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I will first describe something of the history of the term ‘projective identification’ followed by discussion of Klein's own ideas about it in the two published versions of her paper ‘Notes on some schizoid mechanisms’ (Klein, 1946, 1952a) and in her 1955 paper ‘On identification’. Then I will discuss two sets of unpublished entries on the concept of projective identification in the Melanie Klein Archive.
Although Melanie Klein was the originator of the definition and usage of the concept of projective identification as we know it today, she was not the first person to use the actual term. It was first used by Edoardo Weiss, in 1925 in a paper called ‘Über eine noch unbeschriebene Phase der Entwicklung zur heterosexuellen Liebe’ in the context of explaining sexual object choice (Weiss, 1925). Klein refers to Weiss's paper in The Psycho-Analysis of Children (Klein, 1932b, p. 250, n. 2) where she explains Weiss's understanding of sexual object choice, using the term ‘projection’ in her explanation but not discussing his use of the term ‘projective identification’ (see also Massidda, 1999 and Steiner, 1999).